Web Comics

One of the motivators to learning to read as a kid was the Sunday morning comics. Garfield, Peanuts and many others in their colorful format would catch my eye. Later on I would enjoy reading through the various collected anthologies of Calvin and Hobbes that I had, a personal favorite to this day. Perhaps they are the reason that I still enjoy reading webcomics today. Of course on our Department of Offence we have had two web cartoonists interviewed: Sketch Gustafson and Doug Kallberg, and I would recommend giving any of those interviews a listen to.

Personally I have a wide variety of webcomics that I read and try to stay caught up on, which becomes rather difficult when the book marks folder I have takes twenty seconds to scroll through. So my usual method of consumption involves going on an archive binge. Archive binges are where you read a massive number of archived articles (that do not necessarily have to be webcomics). I use this method and only keep up to date on a few webcomics at a time. A very few webcomics almost require an archive binge to read at all like the very well done Homestuck by Andrew Hussie, which updates an average of 5.5 updates a day and is thousands of pages long.

One thing I enjoy about webcomics is how often times the art and story will evolve over time, such as the first page of Questionable Content compared to this one. Or this page of Nerf This to this more recent one. If you take a look you can see how the art went from being pretty meh to actually pretty good for a regularly updating strip. Of course not every strip has that kind of art evolution, such as if you take a look at Randall Munroe’s XKCD which has managed to go from stick figures to… stick figures; better drawn, cleverer, stick figures.

As I mentioned there are actually a few webcomics that I do stay up to date on. One of the ones I have not mentioned yet is one called Two Guys and Guy by Rickard Jonasson. The clever comedic sociopathy parallels the television show Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia. A more recent one that I have added to my *Keep Up To Date On* list is the wonderfully drawn Paranatural by Zack Morrison with its witty dialogue some pretty hilarious facial expressions.

One thing to keep in mind about webcomics is that often Sturgeon’s Law (or more techcically Sturgeon’s Revelation) applies, that 90% of everything is crap. For every gem of a webcomic out there, nine webcomics that are pretty horrible are out there. That’s if you are being generous. Of course it all comes down to personal taste in the end.

-This will certainly not be the last time I cover the topics of webcomics, and certainly not the last time I use a lot of hyper links. After all next week I am covering tvtropes.